Cliff Notes From the Blog World

Memeorandum, which started with a focus on political blogs in 2004 and launched a technology version just weeks ago, aims to be the automated newspaper of the online world.

It attempts to solve the problem of information overload with a few smart algorithms that constantly track the hot topics in tech and politics blogs.

However, it's not just the Google News of the blog world, since in addition to automatically tracking the top stories of the day, it also highlights the conversations between bloggers and mainstream media about each topic.

Gabe Rivera, the 32-year-old programmer who quit his job at Intel to found the site, says he built Memeorandum thinking of the "live web as an editor."

"If you read blogs, you know that there is this conversation and that some articles are the talk of the day, and other posts have important things to say about those," Rivera said. "If you built graphs in your mind of what the talk looks like, I think it looks like what I've done. I get the sense (Memeorandum) is just a natural representation of what is already going on."

Rivera hopes the site will appeal to more than just the überconnected, and could be useful as an entry point for those unfamiliar with blogs. To that end, the site's design, which features large headlines and stories in declining order of importance, mimics that of an online newspaper.

"The best way for someone to get into (the) blogs thing is to find a blog that is tracking an issue important to you, because someone new to it can understand the headline and then go read the blog. I think my site works pretty well that way," Rivera said. "My dad started using my site ... a couple weeks later he spotted something he was interested in and now he knows all these bloggers."

Michael Arrington, co-author of TechCrunch -- an online review of web 2.0 companies -- says Memeorandum has changed how he uses the web more than any other service he has profiled.

"He's just nailed it," Arrington said. "The main items can be a journalism piece, a blog post or a press release, but the discussion is so cool since it's like instant editorials, which is what most blog posts are. Memeorandum is much easier than doing a search on the link, and for myself and others like Robert Scoble, it has disrupted how we use the web."

"I have 400 feeds, and reading those takes me four hours -- and I was doing that every morning," Arrington said. "Since Memeorandum, I use my feed reader significantly less."

Arrington says he visits the site for updates 20 times a day, and finds that it gets news faster than even real-time search engines like Technorati.

Arrington's main complaint, besides his distaste for the site's visuals, is that he wants a version devoted to sports.

Others have criticized the service as being insular, since the algorithms start looking for stories by relying on a select group of A-list technology and policy bloggers.

But Rivera says that outside sources can quickly become the top item, as demonstrated when a press release from the American Association of Publishers announcing a lawsuit against Google Print instantly became the No. 1 story on Memeorandum.

Memeorandum isn't the only site trying to make sense of the real-time web. Others like digg, reddit, del.icio.us, newsmap and Blogniscient have similar goals, but many of these rely heavily on users voting on or submitting stories.

"Memeorandum is as much about aggregating reader intelligence as it is about aggregating articles," Torkington said in an e-mail. "It's a great step toward a tool that can turn a flood of grapes into a trickle of fine wine. Google News aggregates the editorial judgment from newspapers, but Memeorandum treats blogs and newspapers equally, which means it's tapped into the collective zeitgeist of the net."